NVIDIA has just released a new short but sweet trailer for Black Myth: Wukong, which focuses on Ray Tracing and DLSS 3. This trailer features some comparison scenes, in which the green team showcased the benefits of RT. So, if you are interested in this title, be sure to at least watch it.
Black Myth: WuKong is a third-person game that is based on Journey to the West. The game will focus on the Monkey King and his special abilities. Additionally, it will offer players 72 different abilities to use, and it will have a lot of bosses to fight.
In this game, you’ll face many different enemies, each with their own special skills. As the Destined One, you’ll need to learn various staff techniques. But that’s not all – you can also mix and match different spells, abilities, weapons, and gear to find the best way to fight. The game focuses a lot on dodging enemy attacks, so think of it as a mix of Sekiro and Dark Souls, but instead of parrying, you’ll have to dodge the enemy attacks.
A couple of months ago, NVIDIA revealed that the game will have full Ray Tracing on PC. This means PC gamers can enjoy ray-traced Global Illumination, Shadows, and Reflections. The game will also support NVIDIA DLSS 3.5 Frame Generation and Ray Reconstruction.
Game Science has also shared an official benchmark tool for Black Myth: Wukong. As the devs noted, this benchmark tool represents the performance you’ll be getting in the game. You can go ahead and download it from here. We’ve also shared some initial 4K results for you.
Now as I wrote in that article, I was a bit disappointed with Black Myth: Wukong. You see, the game suffers from major shader compilation and traversal stutters. Let’s just hope that the devs will have them fixed in the final version.
Black Myth: Wukong will hit the PC on August 20th. The game will also have the Denuvo anti-tamper tech.
Enjoy and stay tuned for more!
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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Denuvo means fück off to me.
But the game looks solid.
So with the ray tracing on, the water is clearer? And the shadows are sharper? Those are things that games can do without ray tracing… And without the massive and utterly pointless hit to FPS…
Another f@g who doesn't know how hag Ray tracing does, nice
Sounds like someone doesn't know how worthless ray tracing is.
RT does improve the quality of the lighting quite a bit, so how you can say that RT is worthless? You really cant tell the difference between ugly SSR (details fade and pop as you move) and RT reflections, or between flat lighting (no indirect shadows, no light / color bounce) and realistic lighting?
I have played quite a few games with RT and have been blown away by the difference it can make. For example the witcher 3. This game has really flat lighting and ugly water rendering (SSR) without RT. My old GTX1080 could only run this game at 7fps with RT at 1440p, but now I get around 80fps (110-130fps with DLSS Quality and up to 170fps with FG).
RT is very intensive but relative performance difference on modern GPUs between RT and raster is relatively small (22% relative difference on my GPU in Black Myth Wukong benchmark).
The PC platform used to be a place for technology enthusiasts, but now, for some strange reason, people have started to hate progress like a console gamers.
Dude, if you think RT isn't worth the performance hit on your PC, just play without it, but don't say it's worthless because you're being disingenuous and making yourself look clueless.
Ray tracing is either barely noticeable in most games, or it just plain looks bad. It doesn't look realistic in any game I've tried it in. It also massively tanks the FPS unless you have an RTX 4090. It's a pointless technology, and I've never liked it in any game I've tried it in. Yes, the reflections look a lot better in Cyberpunk with it on, but that's because the game uses an extremely low resolution for its reflections so they look horrible.
Some games have limited RT (for example Guardians Of The Galaxy, Battlefield 5 or Doom Eternal, Resident Evil games), but I could still tell the difference when RT was on because the RT reflections looked so much better compared to the SSR ugly mess. There are also quite number of games where the difference was absolutely massive to me (for example the witcher 3, Cyberpunk, Alan Wake 2, Metro Exodus standard edition, dying light 2, Avatar). I also started replaying some older games thanks to RT, becasue there's quite a big difference in Half Life 1, Serious Sam, Quake 2, Portal. I'm not a fan of Minecraft, but even this game look mighty impressive now thanks to RT.
RT makes a big difference but of course there's a price to pay (performance hit), so people might want to play without RT for this reason. On my RTX4080S I can however play every single game with RT and still get high refreshrate experience (even in extremely demanding games like Alan Wake 2). I've played Metro Exodus at 4K with RT and I had around 85fps (over 120fps with DLSS). The game looked much better with RT (the lighting no longer looked flat, and the characters blended well with the scenery) and fps was smooth as butter. There are quite a lot of RT games that run at similar framerate on my PC, so RT is absolutely usable for me.
I have 1440p monitor, but I play games at 4K becasue AI powered DLDSR make even blurry TAA games look perfectly sharp and detailed. In the most demanding RT games like Alan Wake 2 I had to use DLSS performance, and DLSS FG on top of that to get around 100fps, but the image quality on my 1440p still looks good (better than 1440p native) and at 100fps games are still joy to play.
On my old GTX1080 performance impact was absolutelly massive with RT. I had 55-70fps without RT and 7fps with RT. Even SSR could sometimes destroy my fps (for example in the Witcher 3 SSR at high droped my performance from 55-75fps down to 28fps) on that card. On my RTX 4080S however RT performance hit isnt nearly as big. In Black Myth benchmark I get 99fps without RT and 77fps with RT, that's 22% relative diffefence.
I don't always want to play with Path Tracing though, because there are some problems with it. For example, in Cyberpunk, some places look too dark with PT, so the lighting artist would have to adjust the lighting for every single light source throughout the game to make PT perfectly usable. You cant just turn on PT and expect the game to look good. Path tracing look also noisy due to the limited number of rays and there's excessive ghosting (much more noticeable even compared to TAA ghosting). I'm happy 100% happy with hybrid RT though. Hybrid RT dont have such problems in cyberpunk and it still look much better compared to raster. PT look nice on screenshots, but I dont want to play this game with it.
RT has been implemented in over 100 games and it seems that RT is here to stay, whether people like it or not. For now, people can turn it off, but in a few years (PS6 ports era) games will probably not even run without HW RT.
I did some testing to see if I could tell the difference between Cyberpunk with raytracing on, and Cyberpunk with raytracing off. In normal gameplay where I was running/driving around, you couldn't tell unless you specifically focused on a light source. The difference made by HDR is at least 100 times more, and it actually looks good whereas games usually don't look as good with ray tracing on as they do without it. Even in old games with extremely outdated lighting, I'd rather have no ray tracing and just use ReShade to tweak the shadows and such to make it look better. There's nothing that ray tracing does that's even remotely worth the massive FPS hit, and honestly once NVIDIA can get ray tracing to work without an FPS drop I will probably still prefer to play without it just because I don't like it.
In Cyberpunk reflective surfaces (puddles, windows, cars, water, and even metallic surfaces) are literally everywhere, so the difference is always there. RT also improves indirect lighting. You can pre-bake GI, but if game objects can move (cars, character models), they will be illuminated differently and no longer fit the scene. RT GI addresses this problem.
For example, this comparison. Can you see that this car is missing indirect shadows without RT? Reflections on this car also look much better. With RT, there is also a natural bounce of color off the wall.
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/fe0eb0b53a3d76cb089ba4b3eba454f16ce473ff2cbdb460e0754d0d706c8a2e.jpg
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/3627e08aa78aa01c47b2a74cfa5ce6eb2e49c34e5c2a46acc98b19bf5c8c8901.jpg
With 2.0 patch the difference in this comparison would even bigger, because 2.0 patch adds support for Ray Reconstruction, so RT reflections and shadows look perfectly sharp (without RR these effects are rendered at much lower resolution).
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/279e002477ef268bef61134fe1a6d2695be5795e74ec9112b280986f3470e0bf.jpg
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/7ae9c2d14c03a32f1c9b8882093c84bbc6a61e20b9fc03847212c7cecb16b8ca.jpg
Even on these small thumbnails I can see quite a big difference. The game looks a lot better with RT, and it runs as smooth as butter on my PC as well (around 120fps at 1440p DLSS Quality, and nearly 170fps with FG).
People who don't understand light may have trouble noticing what RT does, but I'm a photographer and Photoshop artist. With my knowledge and understanding of light, what RT does is simply breathtaking. By saying you do not like RT, you are basically saying you do not like realistic graphics, because you cant get realistic lighting without RT. Even prebaked lighting is result of RT dude.
The shadows under cars thing doesn't require ray tracing to pull off, they just didn't bother in Cyberpunk.
The reflections in water without ray tracing being poor is the result of the low resolution they are rendered at (try turning off the anti-aliasing some time and look at how blocky the reflections are). That being said, what ray tracing does to the reflections in Cyberpunk isn't better, because the effect is overblown and doesn't look good. You're also not going to notice the difference when running or driving anyway.
Ignorance is bliss.
I tried the benchmark and my pc got good scores. Thought it looked nice also.
I tried the benchmark demo and it wasn't a stutter fest for me. I had one stutter during the first benchmark run. My pc is a lowly Dell 3630 with a 4070 stuffed in it.
It seems RT in Black Myth Wukong will be only usable on RTX 40 series, because this game relies on OMM (Opacity Micro-Maps) accelaration used for vegetation and foliage. There is a lot of foliage and vegetation in this game, so the RTX 40 series cards deliver up to 2.5x performance over previous series.
Interesting, no wonder my 3070 could only render half the frames with RT turned on. Barely-perceptible visual difference, and the shadows are too sharp.
RT is pointless in this game, looks good enough without RT and lets be honest we care about the gameplay to see if we can git gud with it, the rest are cherries on top
No it's not pointless, we can clearly see the massive difference.
Let people cope in peace
In my opinion, all people who have at least a basic understanding of light have an appreciation for what RT does.